Monday, March 18, 2013

Feathered Dinosaurs

It has come to my attention recently that nerds hate
feathered dinosaurs.

Not *all* nerds, obviously, but a lot of 'em.
And why? Apparently because dinosaurs no longer look "cool" enough: they're "fluffy",
they're "chickens", and most importantly, they don't look as cool as
they did in "Jurassic Park".

I'm a casual dinosaur
fan, but I am pro-feather aesthetics. Feathered saurians look both
ferocious and adorable, and it dissolves the idea that dinosaurs are a symbol
of obsolescence. They didn't die out because they weren't "good
enough": they grew and changed and adapted and are still around today.

I still like the look of
"classic" dinosaurs (or really, the style where they are reptilian
but sleeker and more active, as inspired by the Robert T. Bakker school of
thought), but I don't personally care that one style now is inaccurate to
varying degrees.

I say "pro-feather
aesthetics" because you can't be pro- or anti-dinosaur feathers: that's
like saying you can be pro- or anti-gravity. One's aesthetic distaste for a scientific
fact does not change its legitimacy, and you can't "decide" to accept
it the way you accept or deny changes to a fictional character. It has already
been decided by science: you don't have to *like* feathered dinosaurs,
but they exist.

So, there's frequently an
anti-science subtext to the hatred of feathered dinosaurs: the complaint is
that science has "corrupted" dinosaurs, implying progress
should not have happened. Paleontologists should never have dug deeper and
found that dinosaurs beyond Archaeopteryx had feathers, or at least never
spread it around, because it interferes with the popular image of dinosaurs.

It might not be what the anti-feather aesthetics
folk intend to say, but how else would you "reclaim" dinosaurs but by
denying what science has found? Pretending dinosaurs never had feathers is like
pretending that cavemen rode them. Both have their pop culture appeal, but both
can't be considered equal to legitimate science.

What's also eye-rolling is the way the presence of
feathers is treated as an emasculation. It might be just me, but there's an
ugly sense that by having feathers, dinosaurs have now been feminized, are no
longer the scaly behemoths that little boys played with in the sandbox with,
but are now (choke!) "girly".

Because of that, I'm reluctant to try to get the
feather-haters to accept that feathered dinosaurs are "still badass".
It's trying to play the game by the other person's rules, instead of just pointing
out that animals are simply animals, not "manly" or
"girly". Nor do scientifically-accurate depictions have to prove
themselves, either.

It's also strange that others keep going back to Jurassic
Park as the counter to feathered dinosaurs. "Jurassic Park" had great SFX and was a fun
movie (though as I get older, the anti-science preaching becomes more
annoying), but its dinosaurs are essentially movie monsters who run all over
facts in the name of being cool.

And yeah, I'm fine with most of that (except the
T-Rex's vision problems, which make no sense in all the wrong ways) *in a movie*. But to hold up these
exaggerations of dinosaurs as the ideal counterpoint to modern science is
insane. It's like saying werewolves are the "true" vision of wolves,
and all those packs in the woods are just poseurs.

I've got no problem with preferring the
"look" of reptilian dinosaurs, whether those dinosaurs are from the
eighties or the eighteen hundreds. But turning that preference into a denial of
science, or a defense of dinosaurs' implicit masculinity, doesn't work.